John Lytle Wilson

Medium: Painting

Location: Inside Cochran Law Firm

John Lytle Wilson (born February 9, 1977 in Rock Hill, South Carolina) is an artist, best known for his brightly-colored paintings of cartoon robots, monkeys and unicorns engaged in combat or flight and sometimes invading kitschy landscapes from thrift store paintings. Wilson spent part of his childhood in China, where he became fascinated with Buddhist art. He attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts. He then studied painting and printmaking at Birmingham-Southern College. He graduated in 1999. He then spent another year in China before enrolling in graduate school at Florida State University in 2001. He completed his Master of Fine Arts from FSU in 2004 and remained on staff for the next three years. In 2008 Wilson moved back to Birmingham with his wife, Liz. He taught in the Wallace State and UAB art departments before joining the faculty at Birmingham-Southern College in 2013, where he taught painting and design. He left in 2018 to pursue painting full-time. Wilson has exhibited locally at Artwalk, Grand Bohemian Gallery, Magic City Art Connection and Rojo. He was also artist-in-residence at Gallery 621 in Tallahassee and has been shown in the Vienna Biennale, the Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, and numerous other galleries. In 2013 Wilson mounted a solo exhibition, “The Shrine of the Most Glorious Future” at the UAB Art Gallery. Wilson has painted large-scale murals for exterior of 5th Row on Morris Avenue and for the interiors of the Magic City Wellness Center on 4th Avenue South, and Innovation Depot.